For 22 years, the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience has brought together leaders in Cognitive Neuroscience and promising graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and young professors/scientists for an intensive, two-week lecture and laboratory course aimed at topics on the cutting-edge of the discipline. This proposal seeks five years of funding for the program's continuation. The Summer Institute focuses on staying up-to-date with the field's latest advancements and exposes its participants to the latest rapidly emerging methods and discoveries. Through a combination of lectures, debates, close interaction among Institute attendees, and laboratory demonstrations, using advanced techniques such as functional neuroimaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and event-related potentials, participants are provided with an intense and rich exposure to a broad array of techniques and approaches bisecting all fields bearing on the mind and brain. The intensely interdisciplinary nature of the Summer Institute is its most defining feature and valuable asset. The next 5 years of the Institute will continue its successful traditions, while also providing innovations to significantly augment and enhance the program. The Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience provides an essential service to the field by providing the nation's young scientists with unique training that fosters interdisciplinary perspective and collaboration, and by encouraging cross-disciplinary exchange between established scientific leaders and young, promising researchers. The Institute contributes directly to the advancement of the field by calling attention to and advancing knowledge of issues at the frontiers of current discovery that are relevant to the mission of the NIH in basic and translational research and training. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project will provide intensive training in the principles, theories and methods of cognitive neuroscience that are relevant to both healthy individuals and individuals suffering from disorders of the mind and brain, from infancy through old age. This enhanced training will allow scientists to make more rapid progress in understanding the operation of the normal brain and in understanding a variety of mental and neural disorders, which will ultimately lead to improved diagnosis of these disorders, as well as improved assessments of new treatments.